Combining two imagine technologies, such as MRI for structure and MEG for activity, could provide a new understanding of our how our brain works. New advances related to new uses of imaging technologies could help scientists uncover the brain’s mysteries. Now, European scientists have successfully combined magnetic resonance imagining, or MRI, scanning with an emerging imaging technology called magnetoencephalography, or MEG. There have thus bundled two ways of imaging the brain in one helmet-like device. Because MEG records the magnetic fields produced by our brain, as brain cells fire off messages to one another, it gives scientists a real-time insight into our brain as it processes its world around it. MRI, meanwhile, gives structural images of the brain by looking at blood flow a...

KOCHI: Functional brain mapping, a highly technical procedure, was done for a epilepsy patient at the Amrita Advanced Epilepsy Centreat Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences here on Thursday. The procedure was done as part of the two-day workshop on the latest treatment modalities for epilepsy. The patient, a young woman hailing from Kochi, underwent this procedure as part of her treatment. Functional brain mapping is done only in a few centres across the world as it requires state-of-the-art facilities. The various aspects of the brain mapping were explained by epilepsy experts like Dr Taufik Valiante, co-director of the epilepsy programme at the University of Toronto, and Dr Venkat Sadanand, associate professor of Loma Linda Medical Centre, Los Angeles, USA. Dr Prem Nair, medical director...

Scientists at the Allen Institute for Brain Science reported in the latest issue of the journal Nature that human brains share a consistent genetic blueprint and possess enormous biochemical complexity. The findings stem from the first deep and large-scale analysis of the vast data set publicly available in the Allen Human Brain Atlas. The results of this study are based on extensive analysis of the Allen Human Brain Atlas, specifically the detailed all-genes, all-structures survey of genes at work throughout the human brain. This dataset profiles 400 to 500 distinct brain areas per hemisphere using microarray technology and comprises more than 100 million gene expression measurements covering three individual human brains to date. Among other findings, these data show that 84% of all gene...